Inside the Marketers Studio - David Berkowitz's Marketing Blog

20 Reasons the Luxor Sucks

Instead of a lengthy introduction, scan the slides, which should speak for themselves. I'll share more in a postscript.

20 Reasons The Luxor Sucks

View more presentations from David Berkowitz. (tags: travel hotel)

Opt-Out Hell as Microsoft Loses Momentum

This is a true story.

The mission: unsubscribe from a newsletter

How it should work: one click and you're off the list

How it really worked: try to unsubscribe... which requires signing in... but then I can't remember the ID so I try recovering it, but that doesn't work, so I have a lengthy exchange with one customer service team... who refers me to another customer service team... who then deals with a third team that's finally able to remove me from the list

The good news: I'm no longer a subscription to Microsoft Momentum, a newsletter I've tried to get off before but never tried so aggressively to do. And Microsoft customer support was very responsive, even if it often took a few emails for them to get what I was talking about. 

The bad news: other users will have to go through this very exercise.

Below I'm including the text of the exchanges. There's a lot here, all in the extended entry. You can click to

LinkedIn Connects

My questions for LinkedIn have all been answered, but it's worth taking a moment to appreciate how LinkedIn went about it:

* I received three emails from someone in customer service, the first two from a standard customer service address, and the third from his own email. While he could have been a little more gracious and understanding, he did come around and explain what was going on.

* Then I received an email from LinkedIn's Community Evangelist Mario Sundar, who I had met previously but who got in touch with me only from reading my blog and Twitter feed (which, right now, mainly publishes links to my blog since I'm still not sure how I want to use Twitter). He wrote me on his own, and then commented on this blog, and he also introduced me to someone who heads up LinkedIn's customer service team.

* At the end of the workday Tuesday, I received a surprising call from the customer service chief who called to make sure everything was alright, and she admitted LinkedIn could update the verbiage on the site.

Throughout it all, some comments on the blog and one from a friend via IM helped add more color to my questions and then raise another question.

I've been writing letters to companies literally since I was old enough to write, and they were either one-sided or a very flat exchange (I write once, they write back once, case closed). This is something much more interactive, or Web-like if you will. It really is breaking down the barriers between companies and customers; it's really feeling more like people dealing with people.

LinkedIn Links to Recent Contacts and Redefines "Recent" in the Process

On Friday, I wondered what happened to a favorite LinkedIn feature for viewing recent users. I received two subsequent emails from customer service, only to find out I was wrong about the feature because of LinkedIn's questionable grammar. The semantic web's a long way off if we can't master our native languages' semantics first.

Here's the first of the two responses:

I do apologize for not being familiar with this feature. I did some research and no one that I talked to was familiar with this feature either. So, I have escalated this to a higher level for you. I am sure we will get to the bottom of this for you. Thank you for being a valued Linkedin Member.

While I didn't feel that valued, I received one more email that answered enough of my questions for the time being:

I found the answer to your dilemma. The old “Other Contacts” browser (which is still available for users who don’t have Javascript enabled) allowed you to “view recent users first”.  It displayed the LinkedIn members in your “Other Contacts” sorted by when they joined LinkedIn, not when they last logged on. To get to the old contacts browser without actually disabling Javascript on your browser, you can use this link:  http://www.linkedin.com/otherContactsNojs

The specific view you’re talking about is this: http://www.linkedin.com/otherContactsNojs?membersOnly=membersOnly&context=2&sortAction=mid&reset=reset 

I hope this helps. I do apologize for not being familiar with this right away. For the confusion I have given you 5 InMails to use. They do expire in 90 days so don’t let them go to waste. Enjoy and have a great weekend!

This gets into the semantic confusion. The entire time, I thought "recent users" meant "people who used LinkedIn recently." Yet LinkedIn actually meant "newest users," which is still helpful, but nowhere nearly as useful for me. If my contacts were on LinkedIn recently, as I thought LinkedIn implied, then it meant I was reaching out to someone already recently engaged with the site. Yet these were the newest contacts, so I was performing a different service instead, often becoming one of the first people to connect with them and helping them build their networks.

The end result is the same, and I still like being able to sort by newest contacts as one more way to slice and dice the list rather than just alphabetically. I'd love for LinkedIn to amend its privacy policy and allow sorting by recent users additionally, but I'd imagine given the frequency to which LinkedIn is used as a job hunting site, the backlash would be greater than the appreciation by a few of its power users. Granted, if people are actively job hunting, they're probably suddenly ramping up connections, especially to recruiters, and that will in turn be displayed to others in that person's network. It's hard to take advantage of a site like that and use it in complete stealth; a much better practice is to use it consistently, whether that's daily, weekly, or monthly, depending on your role, profession, and temperament for networking.

Two postscripts:

1) A blog reader wondered if LinkedIn still has the feature where you can view who's viewed your profile (at least in some vague sense, such as a location or employer) and how many times your profile came up in search results. I saw it about a week ago but don't see it anymore. Do you still see it? I've also asked my new best friend in customer service for more dirt.

2) If we have met or been in contact to some degree, I welcome connecting.

 

 

LinkedIn: The Customer is Delusional

It's fun being called delusional by customer service. Today, LinkedIn is trying to make me feel like I'm in that Jodie Foster movie Flightplan where she claims her daughter was kidnapped while on an airplane and everyone else thinks she's nuts. The movie wasn't supposed to be very good (it scored 38% on the Tomatometer), and I'm not sure this blog post will be any better, but I can at least empathize with Foster's character based on the previews.

Several days ago I sent LinkedIn this message:

What happened to the feature under My Contacts/Other Contacts where you can sort contacts based on if they've been on LinkedIn recently? This is very helpful, as I have thousands of contacts, and it's important to be able to prioritize recent users. I'd invite many more contacts to my network if you reinstated this feature.

Here's the response I received back:

Hi David,

Thank you for contacting Linkedin Customer Support. The function that your speaking of has never been a feature on Linkedin. It would be against our own privacy agreement. If you have any further questions please feel free to contact us. Thank you for using Linkedin.

Thanks,

[Name omitted]
Customer Support Representative

So, either LinkedIn's customer is delusional (I guess I'm more of a user than a customer since I don't buy anything from them), or their customer service rep - one with 450+ contacts, no less - isn't familiar with his own site. Better yet, the outcome may be that they have customer service personnel who don't know their own company (and, come on, there aren't THAT many features on LinkedIn), AND they may have been violating their own privacy policy for many months, if not a couple years.

Have you ever used that feature I so miss (that perhaps violated others' privacy)? I'll be happy to share your feedback with my new friends in their customer service group.

The Dr. Needs to Pay a House Call to Hill Country

Yesterday I gorged myself at the new authentic Texas barbecue joint in Manhattan, Hill Country (read a writeup from Urban Daddy for more dirt; thanks to Jay Kolbe of Weber Shandwick for the meal). While I'm not a native of Texas, it's become an adopted home state of mine, and I've learned a few things about the Lone Star State:

1. You can't go three feet out of Dallas or Austin without seeing the Texas flag flying proudly.
2. You're either a Longhorn or an Aggie. There's no middle ground. And your fate's decided from birth (or from your first trip to Texas - it was then I learned I'm a Longhorn).
3. Never, ever eat at Bush's chicken, unless you want a survival story to tell your grandkids some day.
4. Real Dr. Pepper is made with Imperial cane sugar, not corn syrup (it's sometimes referred to as Dublin Dr. Pepper from the Dublin, TX plant where much of it is bottled).

At Hill Country, you head to various stations - meat carving, sides, dessert, and drinks - and fill up your tray as you go. I was excited to see they had Dr. Pepper, thinking they might be this oasis of sugar cane sweetness you just can't find many places, even in Texas. If you want it the real way, your best bet is the Dr. Pepper Museum and Free Enterprise Institute in Waco (the museum even has a MySpace profile) or Sprinkles cupcakes in Dallas (its first location outside of LA).

Sure enough, at Hill Country the woman serving up drinks was totally confused when I asked if the good Dr. had cane sugar in it. You'll find it's served in a can with high fructose corn syrup, just like you can get at the 7-11 a few blocks away. If they can serve brisket on butcher paper and their perfectly sweet and slightly minty iced tea in mason jars, they can go the extra mile to serve the real Dr. Pepper so they'll have customers coming back to drink it at 10, 2, and 4.

Unnecessary Dairy Overlap

Here's a great example of user-generated brand feedback from Left-Handed Toons, via Ad Age:

          

Continental Copes with Predictability

My flight to LA today is delayed nearly two hours for "Mandatory Crew Rest." I'm all for well-rested crews, but couldn't someone have thought to build that into the schedule so a couple hundred people wouldn't have to wake up before dawn to catch their flight?

Evangelists of the World, Unite

At the Web 2.0 Expo this week, one title kept popping up on business cards: Evangelist. All the evangelists I met are from companies that have quite a few evangelists in their own right: Salesforce, Yahoo, LinkedIn. The best moment was when I took a detour to Google's Mountain View headquarters on Wednesday and met an in-house evangelist there. I had to ask him the first question that crossed my mind: "Doesn't everybody love you? How could Google need an evangelist?"

I've met corporate evangelists before. Most of the best I've met never had that title. eMarketer CEO Geoff Ramsey, my old boss, is the perfect example. He lives the brand. He's so passionate about charts, stats, data - dry stuff, unless you really think about how you use it. Any time I see him present - and I've been to dozens of his speeches by now - I get excited about what he's doing.

As far as I can recall, he's never had evangelist as a title. CEO works pretty well. I've never had the title either, but I like to think that in any organization I've been a part of for at least a year (including businesses as well as others, like the Binghamton University Alumni Association Board, or MediaPost, where I've published columns weekly since June 2004), evangelism has been an important part of the job. Shouldn't everyone see themselves as a chief evangelist?

That's not to downplay the need for dedicated evangelists - those who can look across a massive organization and mine all the great things it's doing and then spread the word about them. Though I haven't talked to many evangelists in depth about their jobs, they should also be empowered to be open about what isn't yet ripe for evangelism and find ways to make that better. I'm curious what happens when they run into those situations, when there's something they find that they wouldn't want to shout from the rooftops - do they have a strong enough voice internally to right the ship?

It's also a funny term linguistically in the sense that calling someone a preacher, imam, proselytizer, or other terms steeped in religious traditions wouldn't quite work. Yet "evangelist" has gone the way of "saint," with its religious undertones stripped from it.

Maybe they shouldn't be though. Working for a company is usually a test of faith, if you're devoted to it. An evangelist is always going to find things that they see as heretical to their corporate gospels. Yet you don't need to live, breathe, and love every page of your gospel - whether it's in a more literal sense, or whether it's a corporate handbook or 10K form - to find truth in it.

If a company does put the title "evangelist" on one person's business card, it better not be placing all the evangelism responsibilities on him or her alone. It takes a full organization of evangelists to succeed - though it never hurts to have one person whose focus day in, day out is to lead the charge.

Seeking Answers from Yahoo Answers

Yahoo Answers has some explaining to do.

Over the past several months, I've asked 13 questions on the site, as at first I was impressed by the community response. My most recent question asked for help in getting a Slingbox to work, since it won't work with the Ambit wireless modem I have with Time Warner Cable (as an aside, please let me know if you've had similar issues and know if it's hopeless or if there's a fix; I'm about ready to send back the Slingbox). This question on the Slingbox, and four others, have recently been removed by Yahoo Answers, apparently for violating its community guidelines.

The other questions included such "offensive" material such as:
* Wondering what others thought of a certain TV show (and a PG show on basic cable, for what it's worth)
* How people value inbound links for SEO, in doing research for a recent column
* Seeking the best vacation guide anyone has seen in Yahoo Travel
* Asking for any insight into a business service, as someone asked me what I thought of it and I hadn't heard of it

Eight other questions remain on the site, for now. Though it's possible they'll be gone too, including one seeking help in changing a setting on my Motorola KRAZR phone. Why that's up and my Slingbox question is down makes no sense to me whatsoever. But what do I know?

I tried emailing Yahoo through a link in its help materials, but the page was down. I also posted a message in their forums. I'm not expecting an adequate response, but I'd love to hear from others in the blogging community if they've faced similar problems. There are dozens of other Q&A services out there, and if Yahoo gets trigger happy with filtering, then it won't dominate this category indefinitely.

I've also included my interpretation of their wallpaper below (click to enlarge).